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Thursday, January 30, 2014

E.H.U.D.: Chapter 26

Chapter 26

After the evaluations were done and
the General left a new equilibrium came to the Defenders. Now they were left alone, the only remnants
of their previous lives the brightening and dimming of the lights that marked
day and night.

For the first few weeks they were
apprehensive, for the first few weeks they waited for the other shoe to
drop. But it never did. Weeks grew to months, months to years, and
the fifty Defenders grew from frightened savages into something else, a
community held by no possessions, possessed of no privacy either physically or
mentally, separated by nothing. Even the
concept of the individual slowly drifted away until nothing was left save for
the gestalt, the Defender, the one mind of many.

So time passed. They lived, they loved, they sang and they
storied. Mythologies and cosmologies
sprung up around the three shared figures in their lives: Allen the Light,
Mistlethwakey the Dark, Shaun the satellite who gleefully played in the
General's shadow. Through this the
Defenders ceased to be people, and became a people. The only thing kept from them were
children...

Scattered throughout the years of
this idyll were the missions the General would send them on. Every few months they would awaken to find a
Defender gone, a piece of memory missing from the great whole. They would go about their normal routine,
wait for a time, then awaken to find their missing member, freshly shorn and
sunburned, with fresh thoughts to share with the mind.

One night it was John who
disappeared. He fell asleep curled
around Cyd, her long hair tangled into his beard and flowing down his
chest. He awoke sitting upright with
something coarse rubbing across the entirety of his body.

Metal scraped on stone as he
lurched awake, gasped at the sudden brightness around him. He blinked, felt for his beard, found it
missing. Reached to feel his hair, found
only a thin stubble. He looked down at
his body, was horrified to see a bright red rash with small purple tumors
covering his torso, loose flaps of dark skin covering his thighs. A memory pushed itself to the front of his
mind, then, and he relaxed. Clothes. These were clothes.

“Been a long time since you weren't
flapping in the breeze, huh?”

John looked up to see Shaun seated
across from him, wearing a light tee-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat.

“Course, it's been a while since
you've had a breeze.”

There was that. A feeling of constant motion, of an open
world all around. John breathed in a
deep lungful, sneezed, felt his head clear as years of constant pressure he
hadn't noticed was suddenly gone from his sinuses.

Around him was the green of a park,
beyond that a late 20th century city, the buildings blocky and
functional. Overhead, a brilliant blue
sky. He and Shaun were sitting in metal
chairs around a small table on a limestone patio. It smelled like a restaurant. John's mouth watered.

“Alright, architect, you see that
building across the street?”

John didn't look; instead, he
latched onto the building Shaun had seen in his mission briefings. A central tower, its top blossoming into a
helipad. Around that, a blocky building
of glass, most of one wall opening into a courtyard around the tower.

Shaun nodded. That's the offices of the General Staff of
the IDF...

He leaned over the side of his
chair, came up holding a small satchel.

I want you to take this inside,
then look around until you find someone with access to their nuclear
arsenal... Keep looking until you hit
the top of the food chain then plug whatever's in here to whatever the headman
happens to be holding... Then, I want
you to dump some things into the headman's head...

A flurry of commands and conditions
flooded into John's head, a distinct packet of memories that would control
whoever was unlucky enough to receive them.

After you do that, wait five
minutes, unplug, and come back...

John sat in silence for a moment,
running through the command memories again.
You're going to usurp their arsenal...

Shaun frowned. What I'm ordered to do is none of your
business... This is my assignment for
you... You don't ask question...

John knew he shouldn't argue,
should just bide his time until Allen was ready, but this seemed like the kind
of abuse of power, the blatant warmongering, that Allen had trained them to
stop.

Even before the thought was
expressed in words, Shaun was quashing the rebellion. Remember that bitch of yours? What's her name...

Unbidden, the image of Cyd floated
to the top of John's mind, but there was no response from Shaun. Then, the image of Lucy; he hadn't thought of
her in years.

Yeah, that's her... Remember what I threatened to do to her all
those years ago? Just thought you should
know that I made good on those promises while I was on leave over the last
couple of years...

Images of Lucy, her sweaty face
framed by pillows, her bare back arching away before him flooded into his
mind. He gasped and kicked out at the
table. It gonged hollowly and rocked a
little.

Mmm, but she's a good
one... Now I wonder, though, since I've
made good on that threat, what more can I hold over your head? I could give you a full playback, but... I
like those memories a bit too much myself...
Can't kill her, either...
Wouldn't think it, but I've fallen in love with her... Even thinking of
proposing...

His smug smile was too much. John looked away and saw his target in the
physical world, rising behind a stand of trees.

I
know... I'll start taking your memories,
one at a time... Little ones
first... What was she wearing on your
first date? When was your first
date? Then, we'll get a bit
bigger... What kind of music did she
like? What about you did she
like? Before you know it, all you'll
remember was that there was something you were supposed to remember, the most
important thing of all, and it'll be just out of reach... And by God, it'll itch...

John
snatched up the satchel, then crossed the street and passed inside the
building. He strode past security, felt
through the minds of military officers until he found his first target,
followed a chain of memories up the chain of command until he came face to face
with an ancient woman in green fatigues.
He took her tablet, infected it; took her mind, infected it. Five minutes later, he was back on the
street, staring at Shaun who stood to greet him with open arms.

“Good job,
Johnny-boy, you finished off the set!
Thanks to you the United States now has complete access to the world's
nuclear arsenal! And you know what you
get as a consolation prize?”

A sense of
betrayal towards the one person who's taken pity on us in the last decade? John
answered in the relative privacy of his mind.

“You get to
go home!”

There was a
brief moment of elation as John misunderstood his words, then his eyes opened
and he was laying naked on a worn-smooth concrete floor, tremendous pressure
threatening to crush his skull.

Around him
was the mind of the Defender, welcoming him back, clamoring for any news of the
outside world. What did you do? What did you see?

What
did I do? I betrayed Allen... What did I see? The prelude to apocalypse...

Spindly columns of liquid stone
rose from the ground, forming a lattice that supported the sparse weight of a
spindly little man wearing nothing but a tangled beard. Etched into the floor before him was a
circular trench, ten feet wide with a tower rising stalagmite-like from the center. Around the edges were six smaller towers,
arcing up and away from the center, then disappearing into the trench.

As John continued to stare at his
creation portions of it began to vibrate, glow red with heat, melt and reform,
adding detail to the structure. His
tower was almost done.

Lips brushed against his ear, a
whisper tickled the hair that poured down to cover it. “It's time,” Cyd said. “Go to Allen; he needs you.”

Even as Cyd ran off to gather more,
John stood, his chair dissolving back into the synthetic stone it had been
formed from. He took a final longing
look at his tower, then turned to go find Allen. As he walked away the tower began to crumble,
to fill in the trench, to become smooth floor once more.

The other Defenders stood around
one of the thin doors that pierced the room.
There was a loud grinding noise, a clunk, and the door swung
inwards. The Defenders filed out, turned
to the left to follow the trail to the administrative wing of this subterranean
complex, to find the soldiers who guarded the door out. John turned right, followed the hall to
another door: it was unlocked.

Inside he found a long ward, milky
plastic curtains separating off individual beds to one side. At the far end was another door, another
room. This one was as different from the
small clinic as the clinic had been to their living quarters. Off-white walls, pale green trim, a couple of
recliners, a large television. In one
corner, a refrigerator, a microwave, a sink.
This could have been any small apartment in the living world above. As John continued to the door on the far side
of this room, he mentally scanned the two rooms that split off from this one to
either side. Bedrooms, pure and simple:
comfortable beds, desks, personal bathrooms.
This is where Shaun and Allen lived.

Through the last door and—John
didn't know what to expect, but not this.
A storeroom, filled with luxury goods the likes of which he never could
have dreamed of: toilet paper, paper towels, liters of soda, bags of fruit. Everything he had so taken for granted...

“Donalson? What the fuck—” Shaun was cut off by a blow to the back of
his head. He crumpled to the floor,
Allen standing behind him, holding a mesh sack of oranges.

John almost laughed. That was easier than I expected...

Allen actually did laugh. Then he flew backwards through the air,
impacting a metal shelving unit, the shelves springing apart and wrapping
themselves around him.

Shaun leapt to his feet, caught the
oranges, flung them at John. John leapt
over them, spread his legs, caught himself on two facing shelves. The metal sprang away from him, heating and liquefying,
twisting into white-hot tentacles that whipped through the air at him, burning
through his swirling hair.

It was getting hard to breath...

He fell to the ground, dodged
again, focused on the ground immediately beneath Shaun. A puff of smoke surrounded the man as he sank
ankle-deep into molten stone, his boots and pants burning. He didn't scream.

Instead, Shaun lunged into a
back-flip, spraying bits of magma at John.
Pain seared across John's chest as miniscule burns erupted on his skin,
but he was focused on the air around Shaun.

The door into the room burst wide,
a cold wind rushing in to fill the void left by the heated air now forming up in
a dense sphere around Shaun. Shaun
gasped, pushed out at his private atmosphere, his face red and drenched with
sweat.

John was able to maintain the
sphere, felt Allen supporting him, pushing in, smothering their enemy.

Shaun was on the verge of unconsciousness
when the heavy hum of the scramblers began.
He dropped to the cooling concrete as the air that had surrounded him
burst outward, slamming the door closed and knocking John—and the rest of the
shelves—to the ground.

“It... it isn't too late...” Allen was pulling himself out of the metal
embrace of the shelf, struggling to rise.
“We can still kill him...” His
voice lacked a certain conviction. It
was as if he knew he were defeated, were just repeating words he thought John
needed to hear.

And maybe he did need to hear
them. Maybe he did need
reassurance. Because without Allen's
presence, without his voice directly in his mind, John felt fear. After all the years of planning, the years of
waiting, they had tried, and they had failed...

The door burst open again, this
time dissolving in a cloud of splinters that fragmented through the
storeroom. John clenched his eyes shut,
covered them, tried not to be blinded by the shards of wood peppering his body.

When next he opened his eyes a
fourth figure stood in the room, emaciated and weathered, wrapped in an
over-large drab uniform. It took several
long moments before John recognized the spray of snowy hair atop the figure as
belonging to the General.

“Come, Wendleferce, it's time for
the endgame.”

There was no reply save for a weak
gurgling.

John looked away from the General
to see Shaun trapped beneath a heavy shelf, a foot-long shard of wood
protruding from his throat. Already,
blood was pooling in the uneven surface of the floor surrounding Shaun.

“Hmm, can't have that... not
yet. Hate to say it, but there's more
for you to do. And you,” he turned to
fix John with a bemused smile, “this might give you some motivation for
later. Solve a lot of plot-holes, this
way.”

Allen. Where was Allen?

John frantically surveyed the room,
saw Allen standing in one corner, his body limp, his eyes vacant. The scramblers couldn't be affecting him that
much, could they?

A wet sound, like tearing flesh,
ripped John's attention away from Allen's limp form. Shaun was jerking forward, as if something
held him by the neck, even as the splinter twisted and moved of its own
accord. And then it was out. The General smiled. The sides of Shaun's wound pressed together,
bubbled as air escaped, then sealed, the skin scabbing and flaking away,
leaving behind fresh, pale skin. Not
even a scar.

As John watched, three things
occurred to him. One, the General had
become one of them. In retrospect, it
seemed obvious. This man was power
hungry; what better way to ensure his own survival than by giving himself the
greatest power imaginable? Two, he had a
way to bypass the scramblers. That...
that had no obvious answer; John could hash it out later. Three... Allen never had a chance. As much as he had planned, as well as he had
trained his troops, in the end he had been nothing more than a mild annoyance
to the General—never a threat.

And then John awoke, kneeling on
the concrete of the home room, his beard once more shorn. He looked up, saw his companions, his family,
his other minds, kneeling as he was, shaved as he was, shamed as he was. Years waited, years lost, all in a
moment. There wasn't a one of them that
had made it through the battle unscathed.
Most were bruised, with bloody cuts and scrapes over their bodies, with
eyes puffed-shut and joints bulging from sprains. Others were wrapped in brown-stained gauze,
or splinted or sown or God-knew what else.
Two lay on the ground, hardly breathing.

Past the scrambler-hum that hazed
the close air John saw a ring of armored forms spaced along the walls, weapons
pointed in. And at the front of the
room, in the same spot he had stood for countless days across countless years
knelt Allen, naked as they were, bald as they were. He had finally become one of them.

Boots echoed through the room, the
sound intruding through the ever-present scramblers. The General strode in, passed before Allen,
glared out at his charges. “And was it
worth it?” He stopped, turned to face
them, looked from eye to eye. “You
killed fifteen of my men, made it halfway out of the facility, and nearly
ruined the program. I ask again, was it
worth it?”

John rocked back on his heels,
pushed himself up until he was standing.
He was nauseous, he was hurt, but he was able to look the General in the
eye. “Yes.”

Mistlethwakey blinked, then slowly
nodded. “I see. Crushed your bodies, but not your
spirits...” He glanced down at his
boots, then back up to John. “Doesn't
matter, though. The things you've seen,
you won't remember. It's time for
scrubbing, boys and girls, time to wash this place from your pretty little
minds. Then, you won't remember
anything. Not me, not the pain you've
endured, and not the words Allen has infected you with.”

He strode to Allen, placed his bare
hands on Allen's bare head. “What do you
have to say to that, Major Fendleton?”

Allen
jerked, his eyes widened. For the first
time since the General invaded the store room, he seemed to be his old
self. He looked up at the still standing
John, tried to smile. "We are
Defenders. We will defend. We must tick on," he said. "The Q-bomb
must tick on."

With that Mistlethwakey nodded,
stepped away, raised a small pistol and leveled it at Allen's defenseless form.

There was a flash of light, an
echoing crack, and somehow, despite the scramblers, a scream of pain and loss and
sudden relief...

Then there was black...

Once more John was sitting in the
chair, looking at the place where Suzanne had died. This time, Shaun was sitting in here
place.

You ready to see this place go?

The scramblers were gone. John tried to fling himself forward, to
attack his tormentor one last time—

All he succeeded in doing was
sliding limply to the floor.

We've been starving you... You're too weak to pull anything funny...

He tried to push in at the little
vein in Shaun's head, to pinch closed a heart valve, anything... nothing.

Shaun knelt down and wrapped his
hands around John's head. “I'm supposed
to do this fast,” he whispered. “Blank
out everything back to your car wreck.
But... you and I, we have history.
We have to respect that.”

He released John's head, placed his
hands next to John's shoulders, leaned in close so that his lips brushed John's
ear. “You're never going to get back to
her, you know that.”

A beam of brilliant light split
across John's vision as his eyelids cracked opened. He couldn’t make out much of where he was...
it was too dark beyond the light that slanted in from the window facing him.

There was enough light to see the
bed, the blanket, the pock-marked torso that rose from it, to see the burned,
gnarled hands at the ends of his slim wrists.

Enough light to see the silhouetted
form leaning over him. “John? Are you awake?”

The voice was at once familiar, at
once monstrously alien, belonging to two parts of his life that were
irrevocably over.

“Alice...” he rasped, his throat
barely capable of human speech.

Alice turned away from him. “Naomi, he's—”

I know...

As John looked, he noticed other
minds, far more familiar voices, elsewhere in this place. The minds connected to his, spoke to him,
began the process of rebuilding the total unity they had once possessed.

And above all the others Naomi
could be heard. She showed us what
you had in the car with you, John... You
have it whole, you can show me it in its entirety... Now, I will follow you...